Site Mobile Navigation

After 50 Years, the Return of Bangles, Beads and Kitsch

It takes a special wizardry to ride the wild waves of the score of "Kismet." Based on works by the 19th-century Russian composer Alexander Borodin (including his opera "Prince Igor"), the songs of this exotic Broadway curiosity from 1953 swell, swirl, crash and trickle in patterns that your average musical-comedy performer is hardly used to surfing. And do you think it's easy to make light comic and romantic hay from a word like "Rahadlakum" (the title of a second-act lust duet), while dressed like an extra from "Sinbad the Sailor"?

Fortunately, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie, the resourceful stars of this production of "Kismet," which opened this season's Encores! series of American musicals in concert at City Center, have the lungs, the presence and the plain old chutzpah to stay afloat in the show's churning seas. Paired in a full-length musical for the first time since they played the merrily dueling divas in the 1999 Broadway revival of "Kiss Me, Kate," Mr. Mitchell and Ms. Mazzie emerge unbowed from the vicissitudes of "Kismet," with nary a scratch in their armored charisma.

Pretty much everyone else involved with this production -- with the exception of the redoubtable Paul Gemignani, who this season replaces Rob Fisher as the Encores! musical director, and the orchestra -- appears to have been reduced to treading water and praying for rescue. With a book by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis (based on a teeth-gnasher of a melodrama from 1911 by Edward Knoblock), and those ripe Borodin tunes translated into Broadwayese by Robert Wright and George Forrest, "Kismet" is a tough nut to crack open for contemporary audiences -- or to stay in the mood of things, let's make it a tough fig to peel.

"Kismet," which runs through tomorrow at City Center, is one of the odder shotgun marriages of high and low culture to have been conducted on the stages of Broadway, a sort of theatrical equivalent of the old "Silly Symphonies" cartoons. Wright and Forrest, who had struck it big by mining the compositions of Edvard Grieg for "Song of Norway" in 1944, performed similar duties with Borodin, transforming music from the Polovtsian dances in "Prince Igor" and the Nocturne, respectively, into the Eisenhower-era chart toppers "Stranger in Paradise" and "And This Is My Beloved."

But if the melodies came from the Metropolitan Opera House, the mise-en-scène came from Minsky's. "Kismet," which opened (some say mercifully) during a newspaper strike in December 1953, groaned with dopey rhymes (Omar Khayyam is among the characters), puns and double-entendres and featured lots of undulating, flesh-flashing harem girls to sustain the interest of those less-than-eager husbands who had been dragged to the theater from the office. When the reviews finally appeared, Brooks Atkinson (of The New York Times), for one, was not exactly dazzled. But by that time, "Kismet" had established its mass appeal and ran for 583 performances. Tellingly, it has rarely been heard from since in unforgiving Manhattan. (New York City Opera staged an unenthusiastically received version in 1985.)

It is surely possible to have fun with the perfumed excesses of "Kismet" today. But the Encores! production, directed by Lonny Price ("Urban Cowboy"), doggedly tries to simulate the appeal of the original, though obviously with only nods to the lavish physical spectacle that knocked 'em dead half a century ago. There are long hoochie-coochie dance sequences (choreographed with minimal imagination by Sergio Trujillo) and mostly unwinking delivery of dialogue and songs. The orchestra offers a rich earful, but most of the production feels like a microwaved meal of yesteryear's leftovers.

The characters include a cunning huckster of a poet (Mr. Mitchell in a role created by Alfred Drake), his winsome daughter (Marcy Harriell), an eminently marriageable Caliph (Danny Gurwin), an evil but dim-witted Wazir (Danny Rutigliano) and his exceedingly lusty wife (Ms. Mazzie). As for the plot, oh, you know: winsome daughter meets cute caliph, cunning poet meets lusty wife, with ensuing complicated detours before love is allowed to assert its natural rights.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The show's best-known and most hummable numbers ("Stranger in Paradise," "Baubles, Bangles and Beads") fall to the ingénues. Ms. Harriell and Mr. Gurwin have pretty, reedy voices that lack the power to make these songs soar into kitsch heaven. And like much of the cast, they give the impression of being less than ecstatic to find themselves encumbered by mazelike melodies and flat-footed rhymes. Those old pros Tom Aldredge (as a master thief) and Randall Duk Kim (as Omar Khayyam) achieve the appropriate double-edged tone of performing with zest while appearing not to take it too seriously.

Mr. Mitchell, too, provides a leavening nimbleness of comic touch, not to mention an enriching musical delivery that confirms his status as one of the most luxuriant-voiced baritones in Broadway history. (His rendering of the breath-taxing "Gesticulate" is especially charming.)

Poured into a cleavage-framing, clingy gold dress, Ms. Mazzie is an eye-grabbing cross between Mae West and a Bond girl. She brings a radiant, clear-toned brashness to both vaudevillian innuendo and to intricate numbers ("Not Since Nineveh," "Bored") that would wither and die in other hands. Whether making her entrance on a slave-hoisted litter or lounging on a couch made up of shirtless hunks, Ms. Mazzie asserts that no one can do female impersonation like a bona fide, red-blooded female. By the way, this "Kismet" draws some uneasy chuckles that are based entirely on the name of the city in which it is set. "If it is written that I am to die in Baghdad, how shall I avoid it?" one character asks, in a typical example of the show's fate-laden, mock-stately dialogue. "By staying out of Baghdad," answers another. It is unlikely that in 1953 this exchange elicited the same politically approving laughter that it did from the opening-night Encores! audience.

Kismet

Book by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis (based on a play by Edward Knoblock). Music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest (from themes of Alexander Borodin). Directed by Lonny Price; music director of the Encores! Orchestra, Paul Gemignani; choreographer, Sergio Trujillo; sets by John Lee Beatty; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; costume consultant, Tracy Christensen; lighting by Kevin Adams; concert adaptation, David Ives; music coordinator, Seymour Red Press; company manager, Michael Zande; production stage manager, Tripp Phillips; original orchestrations, Arthur Kay; production consultant, Elias El-Hage. Presented by NY City Center Encores!, Arlene Shuler, president and chief executive; Mark Litvin, senior vice president and managing director; Jack Viertel, artistic director; Mr. Gemignani, music director. At New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, (212) 581-1212. Through tomorrow. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this review appears in print on February 11, 2006, on Page B00011 of the National edition with the headline: THEATER REVIEW; After 50 Years, the Return of Bangles, Beads and Kitsch. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe